Chris wrote: > > Typically, people in the R community are not used to the spreadsheet > paradigm and need some time to be able to take advantage of > automatic recalculation, (...) > Do you know what's in my wish list?
I wish spreadsheets and computer languages had gone one step further. I mean, it's nice to define Cell X to be "equal" to Cell Y + 10, and then when we change Cell Y, magically we see Cell X change. But why can't it be the reverse? Why can't I change Cell X _and see the change in Cell Y_? Maybe I'll write a letter to Santa Claus [there are people who write to congressman; they must have more faith than me]. I wish a language where I can write a = b + 10 and then when I write a = 20 the language automatically assigns b = 10. There's a way to simulate this in any computer language, or even in Excel: instead of "variables" or "cells", we have structures with value and a flag. The flag dictates if it's input, undefined or calculated. And then there's a list of relations. So the program/language/spreadsheed loops through the list of relations, detects whenever we can infer a new calculated value, and calculates it, until there's nothing else to do or a contradiction is found. Alberto Monteiro ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
